Contents

July 24 – René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle sails from France, again, with a large expedition designed to establish a French colony on the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

October 7 – Japanese Chief Minister Hotta Masatoshi is assassinated, leaving Shogun Tsunayoshi without any adequate advisors, leading him to issue impractical edicts and create hardships for the Japanese people.

December 10 – Isaac Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, is read to the Royal Society by Edmund Halley.

The Japanese poet Saikaku composes 23,500 verses in 24 hours at the Sumiyoshi Shrine at Osaka; the scribes cannot keep pace with his dictation and just count the verses.

The British East India Company receives Chinese permission to build a trading station at Canton. Tea sells in Europe for less than a shilling a pound, but the import duty of 5 shillings makes it too expensive for most English people to afford.